ABSTRACT
The female sporting body has long been a site of public discussion and debate. For many years, action sports, such as skateboarding, surfing and snowboarding, were considered the bastion of young, white, privileged males. Despite their early and continuing presence in action sports cultures, women have long been subjected to what Foucault terms the processes of exclusion in relation to media coverage. While hyper-sexual images of female models have always been a feature of niche magazines, the appearance of professional female action sports athletes in male magazines such as Maxim, Sports Illustrated and FHM is a more recent phenomenon. Mass and niche media help to produce and reproduce numerous, often contradictory, discourses of gender, sex and sexual identities in action sports cultures. While niche media provides space for a range of discursive constructions, including women as respected athletes and cultural participants, mass media tends to focus on heterosexually attractive female athletes and promotes action sports as a fashion for consumption.
